Our Mission

The Mission of the Institute is to provide an independent forum for those who dare to read, think, speak, and write in order to advance the professional, literary, and scientific understanding of sea power and other issues critical to national defense.

Naval Institute Foundation

Oral History Support at Work

As the first step in a major initiative to upgrade services, each of the more than 260 completed Naval Institute Oral Histories has its own online page highlighting the contents of the project. We plan to digitize every volume—a daunting task, since the collection includes more than 15,000 pages. Each history has an annotated index—in total, more than 4,000 pages—which will also be digitized and cross-referenced. We are working to build an online database where the public can search by individual, subject, location, time period, and more. Visit the Institute's Web site at www.usni.org to track our success.

Some Oral History expenses are obvious, such as the manpower and material costs of recording, transcribing, editing, indexing, copying, and binding. The labor-intensive work on each interview transcript, however, is only part of the objective. The resulting research tool will be a boon to scholars and interested readers for generations to come and will maximize our collection's value as an educational resource.

You can speed our progress by making contributions earmarked for Oral History. Tax-deductible gifts can be mailed to the Naval Institute Foundation, 291 Wood Road, Annapolis, MD 21402, or made online . For more information, call Sue Sweeney at (410) 295-1054 or contact her at ssweeney@usni.org .

Join the Leaders!

Our thanks to the following individuals whose generosity this calendar year distinguishes them as members of The 1873 Society (for gifts of $5,000 or more) and The Leadership Club (for gifts of $1,000-$4,999).